Larry wrote:

Oops...waitaminit! The little green LED on the power brick wouldn't light,
either! Hmm....The power cord is a standard power cord, so I put an old
one on it out of my goodie pile....to see if the switching power supply was
bad. Nope....green light lit up. Plugged in the Dell, booted right up to
WinXP Pro. Let it charge a couple of hours....great.

That's great Larry. I don't like Dell, they use to much proprietary
stuff, particularly the DC power connector on the laptop itself. I've
got one on my bench now, Dell refuses to sell me the connector, they
want me to return the whole shebang so they can charge me $250 bucks to
change a $6 connector. I'm waiting for the owner to get back to me, I
figure on soldering a few wires to the motherboard and piggybacking a
standard co-axial type DC connector externally.. might look a little
gnarly, but will only cost him $5 for the connector, $245 buys a lot of
ugly.

Cheers
Martin